Personal Cognitive Computing: The Next Chapter in the History of Computing

This position paper introduces Personal Cognitive Computing as an emerging computing paradigm and situates it within the historical development of computing. It argues that, as computing becomes increasingly cognitive, it must become personal again: individuals should retain meaningful authority over their information, memory, knowledge, evidence, instructions and computational reasoning. A central challenge is to make these capabilities practical on affordable, consumer-owned hardware rather than dependent on inaccessible infrastructure or proprietary cloud platforms. The paper establishes the conceptual foundation of Personal Cognitive Computing and relates it to Personal Cognitive Sovereignty, Personal Cognitive Engineering, Personal Cognitive Infrastructure, the Nivel reference implementation and the proposed Institute for Personal Cognitive Computing. Part of the PCC Foundation trilogy.